Page 68 of Code Name: Harbor

Finn’s head swiveled my way, his eyes filled with anger and pain. “It’s not for you to know. There’s a version of me that you don’t need to meet. Not unless you have to.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I sat quietly. He clasped his hands, knuckles turning white.

And then he admitted, “But I scared her. Hopefully enough that she’ll keep quiet.”

“You don’t sound convinced,” I observed, because I could see the torture in the fact he’d lost trust in one of his crew. “And you don’t believe her.”

His eyes met mine. “No. I don’t believe her.”

I closed my own eyes for a second, wondering what this meant for me. Was my life in acute danger at that very moment?

I looked to the door. Was someone out there right now?

“I need to tell you some things, Josie.”

My gaze snapped back to him. “Okay.”

“I’m not going to be careful about it. I’m going to tell you and you’re going to do what you will with it.”

Oh, fuck. He was going to tell me… everything.

My first instinct was to hold up my hands and insist he keep it to himself. I didn’t want to know what Finn was into. I didn’t want that knowledge or the responsibility that came with it.

But then I saw it in his expression.

Trust.

He trusted me to do the right thing, whatever that might be.

“I met Connie on the streets when she was sixteen and I was seventeen. I was selling stolen iPhones on a corner, and she was a runaway with a stepfather who’d done her wrong six different ways.”

“Oh,” I murmured, an unfathomable well of sympathy for that poor, young teenage girl.

“The man I worked for at the time took her on. Put her up and gave her work. She was smart and she was hungry and she was loyal to the bone because she had been waiting her whole life for someone to be loyal to. She latched on to me because I was the one who pulled her off the corner and I have spent eighteen years being the person she fixated on. She’s been at my side through every hard thing I’ve done in my adult life. I’ve trusted her with everything. With my crew. With my boat. With everything.”

Finn paused. He looked at the rug again. “And tonight she offered to give your name to a man who slits women’s throats.”

A shudder ripped up my spine.

“I’m telling you this because you need to know what I’m dealing with. And because of what I’m about to tell you next.”

I swallowed hard. I was ready, or as ready as I could ever be to hold Finn’s secrets.

“I move art but not the gallery kind. The other kind. Paintings with complicated provenance, antiquities that were looted decades ago and no one’s looking for anymore, pieces that buyers want to acquire without paying the tax man or filling out customs forms. I work clean and I work careful. I don’t move drugs. I don’t move weapons. I don’t move people. But I do know people who do, Voronin being the big one. And for nine years, we’ve stayed in our own lanes. That was the arrangement.”

He’s an art smuggler.

I mean… I knew he smuggled something illegal, and one fear I had was drugs, but somehow knowing he smuggled art relieved me.

“Um… how exactly did you go from selling stolen goods to smuggling art by water?” I asked, because yeah… I was very curious.

“When I came to Seattle, I met a man named Jim Price. I mentioned him to you once. He found me on the docks in Ballard when I was eighteen, trying to find a hustle job. He gave me a sandwich the first day and a job the second.”

“What kind of job?”

“Put me on one of his boats and taught me all there was to know about waters between Vancouver and Washington. Started out scrubbing decks and then climbed the ladder from there.”

Finn smiled, almost fondly. “He was in his late fifties, no wife, no kids. He’d grown up in foster care and built a life out of nothing. I never had anyone to look up to, and he never had anyone to leave his legacy to. He taught me everything. Numbers. Documents. How to read a buyer. How to read a room. How to read a person. He gave me books to read and made me finish my GED. He paid for me to take community college classes in art history just because I was interested. He treated me like I was his.”